


He Lays In The Reins

by RoseByAnyOtherName17



Series: The Lion, the Wolf and the Dragon [24]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Card Games, Cuddling & Snuggling, Drinking & Talking, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Sparring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-05
Updated: 2018-10-05
Packaged: 2019-07-25 10:18:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16195535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoseByAnyOtherName17/pseuds/RoseByAnyOtherName17
Summary: "Tell me more about these White Walkers," Jaime Lannister said. "Tell me how your bastard brother saved the Wildlings from a fate worse than death."





	He Lays In The Reins

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry for how long it's been, and that this one is somewhat shorter :/ it's been busy lately, but I'll do my best to update again soon! As always, enjoy :)
> 
> Title from the song by Iron and Wine

A raven was sent to Cersei, Daenerys, and Jon Snow in the North. And once again, all there was left to was wait.

 

“Tell me more about this Night King,” Jaime said one evening, sitting across from Arya in the kitchen. She liked to come in here and talk to the servant girls, to learn about their families and persuade the cook to give her an extra cheesy biscuit every now and then. After dinner, Gendry went to the yard to spar with Ronnie, the Tyrell man he was convinced liked Arya, and Jaime followed her here. At her own insistence (and to the Tyrells’ great surprise), Jaime and Myrcella were not kept in the cells beneath the castle. Rather, they were given rooms next to each other and guarded every hour of the day if they were not with Arya or Gendry. Only Olenna questioned Arya giving orders like this in her home, but she didn’t ask her to stop, so Arya figured that was as much approval as she would get from the woman.

 

Arya raised an eyebrow at Jaime now. “I thought you didn’t believe in fairytales,” she responded loftily, taking a long pull of her ale.

 

Jaime rolled his eyes and shuffled the old deck of cards one of the servant girls had dug out of a cabinet. “So tell me a fairytale,” he countered. “Tell me a story about how your bastard brother saved the Wildlings from a fate worse than death.”

 

“That’s not a story, that’s the truth,” Arya teased lightly, taking the cards he offered her. Jaime huffed out an irritated breath, but the corners of his eyes were crinkled with amusement. She sobered up, passing him the ale when he gestured for it. “What do you want to know?”

 

“Why would your bastard brother help the Wildlings?”

 

“Lots of reasons,” Arya said truthfully. “Bringing the Free Folk south of the Wall gives the Night King less bodies to turn into his army. Jon protects people, even when no one else is sure that he should. And…” She hesitated, unsure if telling Jaime this would be a bad move. On one hand, everyone already knew, from the Night’s Watch to the rest of the North. If he took their side, Jaime would learn sooner rather than later anyways. “He spent time with them,” she finished. “A lot of time, at first as a spy for the Watch, but he grew to care for them. He wasn’t willing to leave them behind, not when he had witnessed what the Night King could do.”

 

“And what is it that the Night King can do?” Jaime asked. He had lost the slightly scathing tone. Arya wondered if he had noticed.

 

“He can raise the dead,” she answered. “He can take a body that was utterly destroyed and still make it do his bidding. And he doesn’t just use men. He uses women and children too, every corpse he comes across. Jon watched a Wildling woman be torn apart by the bodies of children because she couldn’t bring herself to fight them.”

 

“If the Night King can do all that, how does Westeros stand a chance?” Jaime idly flipped a card face-up on the table between them. “You can’t kill what’s already dead.”

 

“No, but you can burn them to ash,” Arya said softly, “and incapacitate them with Valerian steel. The White Walkers too; they crumple to snow and ice if you strike them with a Valerian sword. The difficult part of that is getting close enough to do so, because if they hit you first, you don’t just bleed. You freeze.” Jon had a scar on his arm from an ice burn, where the Walker he fought just barely grazed him.

 

“When will they be here?”

 

“Sooner than anyone wants.” Arya took the ale back from him, tipped it back. “I don’t know exactly when. There have been sightings of Wights at the Wall already, but the last time a Walker was seen was at Hardhome.”

 

Jaime nodded slowly. “And you want me to, what? Help fight them? Help you fight my sister? Both?”

 

And Arya saw it, then. She saw the fear lurking behind his eyes, the uncertainty he was facing every second Arya didn’t answer his question. His arrogance was a front designed to make him untouchable, but he had seen horrors in his life. He survived, like she had, and suffered loss, like she had. He had nothing left but the daughter who hardly knew him anymore, and a hand made of gold that could never replace the skill that had been taken away. He was a man, not the legend that the rest of Westeros made him out to be.

 

“I won’t ask you to fight your sister,” Arya told him, “but you must know: I intend to kill Cersei. I will not allow her to survive this war.”

 

Jaime leaned forward in his chair, locking eyes with her. “You’ll be given the name Queenslayer, if you do. It’s not an easy name to bear, child.”

 

“Neither is the name Stark.” Arya leaned forward too. “What say you, Ser? If I kill your sister, what will you do to me?”

 

Jaime sat back, broke eye contact. “Truthfully? I don’t know.”

 

They finished their game in grim silence.

 

**

 

She knew that, sooner or later, one of the Lannisters would make the connection between Gendry and Robert Baratheon. She didn’t know if she was wary or relieved that it was Jaime. “What does your Dragon Queen think of your bastard boy?” he asked her in the training yard. They were sparring with wooden swords, in part because Arya didn’t want to truly hurt him, and so that he couldn’t hurt _her_. The chances of him harming her, however, weren’t in his favor. He hadn’t done much fighting since he lost his hand, and when he had, it was against a right-handed opponent. He still wasn’t used to someone facing him parallel during a fight. Truthfully, Arya wasn’t accustomed to it either, but she had always adapted quickly and knocked his makeshift sword out of his hand every time.

 

“His name is Gendry,” Arya answered, ducking under his clumsy blow and smacking him across the leg, “and she thinks he is an excellent fighter.”

 

“A blind baby could see that _Gendry_ is an excellent fighter,” Jaime scoffed, stumbling but regaining his balance quickly. Arya almost laughed at the slight irony of the statement, but he continued, “What about the fact that he’s most likely the last surviving child of the late King?”

 

Arya really needed to stop being taken by surprise when people said these things, she reflected as Jaime darted past her defenses and tapped her side with the sword. It wasn’t hard enough to hurt, but the gold hand he hit her in the chest with did. She almost fell to her knees, gasping for air, but Ser Jaime grasped her upper arm and steadied her. “My apologies,” he said, and almost sounded like he meant it.

 

Arya took another second to breathe before she spoke again. “If it weren’t for me, I don’t know that Daenerys would have kept him alive, let alone free,” she admitted. It was much more honest than she liked, and Jaime’s eyes widened enough to tell her that she’d shocked him somewhat too. “But he swore fealty to her and she promised me no harm would come to him.”

 

Jaime nodded thoughtfully. “He is in love with you. You know this?”

 

Arya smiled. “I know.” And then she lunged forward and swept his legs out from under him.

 

**

 

Despite knowing his part in her father’s demise, Arya found herself grudgingly liking Jaime Lannister. He was smug and rude at the best of times, and downright nasty at the worst, but she admired him. She saw a kinship in him that she had rarely found before.

 

Myrcella, on the other hand, was much more distant. She was polite to everyone around her, and kind to the commoners in the castle, but she never said much and her smiles never reached her eyes. Gendry tried to get through to her more than Arya, admittedly, but even he couldn’t draw more than a few words from her before she excused herself from the conversation.

 

They talked about it at night in their bed, Gendry’s arms wrapped around her from behind. “Maybe she misses Dorne,” Gendry suggested. “She lived there for quite awhile, didn’t she?”

 

“Maybe,” Arya responded, shifting so that she could lace their fingers together under her pillow. She bit her lip. “How am I supposed to kill them, Gendry? If Cersei doesn’t give up the city…”

 

It’s a conversation they had had already. Gendry believed that Cersei would do anything to save her remaining family, but Arya wasn’t sure. The woman was far gone enough that she blew up the Sept and allowed her son to die in order to gain power. To what length would she go to keep it? Arya had killed a lot of people, but she had never been able to hurt an innocent. Myrcella’s only crime was being born to a woman with a taste for cruelty and murder. If Cersei refused to play Arya’s game by her rules…

 

Gendry used his free hand to sweep her hair away from her neck and place a gentle kiss there. “You’ll know what to do,” he whispered. “You always do.”

 

That was something else. Gendry had lost all inhibitions touching her in front of others, and in the privacy of their own space, he was even more affectionate. He braided her hair when she would sit still long enough, or just tangled his fingers in the strands and massaged her scalp. He liked to brush his lips across her cheek, her forehead, her neck, barely-there kisses that made her entire body light up in a way she hadn’t felt before. She _wanted._ She wanted him to press closer, firmer, because she didn’t know how to do it herself. Part of it scared her, looking at him and thinking that he could probably move her however he wanted and she would go willingly, but the fear was absolved by the knowledge that if she wanted to move him, he would let her just as easily. It was a perfect balance between them, but Arya wanted to try to tip the scale a little and see where they fell. And it frustrated her that she would have to be the one to do it. Gendry was gentle, too aware of how much power he held over her. He would never push this further, not until she explicitly gave the word.

 

She couldn’t though. She couldn’t do that, because he still didn’t know. He deserved to know everything before he made the decision.

 

_When we’re home,_ she thought to herself, listening as his breaths evened out. _When we’re home, and before the White Walkers._

 

Then she woke up with the sun peeking over the horizon and his length nestled in the curve between her spine and ass, and was left wanting all over again.


End file.
